Across the board climate records in 2015 no surprise: researcher

ELEANOR HALL: One of the most respected international reports into the world's climate has been released today, and it contains some record-breaking numbers.

The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s peer-reviewed annual report contains contributions from more than 450 scientists around the world.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick is a senior research associate at the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.

She's the author of a chapter on land surface temperature extremes and she spoke to me earlier.

Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick, this latest report from NOAA warns that 2015 saw records broken across the board in air temperatures, ocean temperatures, sea level rises, extreme weather. How worrying is this?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: Unfortunately Eleanor it's extremely concerning so this report actually really comes as no surprise. We've already been told time and time again that 2015 was the hottest year on record, which beat the record that was set in 2014, and it looks like 2016 will surpass the record again.

So to hear that it's been hot and extreme is basically no surprise. This report is just going to a lot more detail as to why that occurred and with some more facts and figures to back it up.

ELEANOR HALL: The report concludes though that the series of record-breaking numbers is due in part to one of the strongest El Niño effect experience since at least 1950.

Does this mean this can be dismissed as a one off?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: I would not dismiss it as a one off, no. So certainly without a doubt, the El Niño we had in 2015 did play a role in a lot of these extreme temperatures and the record-breaking global average temperature.

So we did have one of the strongest El Niños on record. It also started quite early. We never usually see El Niño take off in about April or May, which is what we saw last year.

So it certainly contributed to the hot temperatures but they still would've been quite hot without the El Niño anyways. When we do have these El Niño events, we do expect to see warm temperatures but we wouldn't expect them at least without climate change to be as warm as what they were last year.

We also need to remember that we're about to, you know, we've got these predictions and they're pretty good that 2016 will be another really hot year on record. And there are predictions also at the moment; they're about to head into La Niña.

So that doesn't really coincide with the whole we only get hot temperatures went it is El Niño because we're going to see these sort of extreme events occur when we don't have an El Niño actually occurring.

ELEANOR HALL: Now this report is compiled by more than 400 scientists from 62 countries, but how reliable are the numbers?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: I would say the numbers are extremely reliable. So they haven't just chosen a couple of scientists who are specific - who are knowledgeable in a specific area, they’ve asked scientists to contribute to this report in their areas of expertise.

That's why we have 450 scientists. They're each working on the separate sections that they know a lot about. So within that, they know the knowledge about what - what data sets are most reliable and fit the most appropriate techniques to get the numbers out of those data sets.

So I'd argue they're actually quite reliable because we have the right experts deriving those numbers from the right data.

ELEANOR HALL: Well your area of specialty is climate extremes and you contributed to that section of the report. What concerns you most about the data that came through from 2015 on this?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: What concerns me most is how extreme it was all over the world really. So we had a lot of heatwaves occur in 2015. Most notable are the heatwaves over Pakistan and India where quite – you know, thousands of people were actually killed.

But then we also had heat - record-breaking autumns over Australia. There was extreme heat over Russia. There was also heatwaves during Europe in summer last year.

So basically everywhere, in terms of heat records, basically lit up like Christmas trees, and this is really concerning. There was a huge signature of this, and we looked at the hottest daily temperatures, and also a signature when we looked at how hot night time temperatures were as well.

So yeah, that's what really sticks out for me, that basically everywhere was extremely warm at least for some part of last year.

ELEANOR HALL: And you don't dismiss that in part at least due to the El Niño effect?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: I will say that in part there was an effect of El Niño. That is true. We always - we almost always have hot weather in Australia consistent with an El Niño. So we can't say that El Niño didn't contribute. Of course it did.

But it would have been a much - it's a fraction of amount of warming compared to what we see due to anthropogenic climate change.

ELEANOR HALL: Is there also a concern that we are seeing stronger El Niño effects at this time?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: So this is still an area of active research. There are some studies coming out that are saying when we have an El Niño, there will be - they will be more intense thanks to climate change.

But we don't really know for sure how climate variability, which is what causes El Niño and La Niña, how that will actually change but there's still a lot research going on into really nutting out how climate change effects those events.

ELEANOR HALL: And how confident are you that governments will take these latest results seriously?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: I'm really hopeful. We have to be hopeful that they actually start to listen to us to say, to say look this is a real problem. We're seeing some really concerning extremes. There's been many, many other reports in many different forms prior to this one.

So I'm really hopeful that the more we add to this pile, the more they'll actually sit down, listen and take some action.

ELEANOR HALL: The UN Paris Conference Agreement commits governments to a series of actions. Will they be enough?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: If we start working soon or if we start working now, hopefully they will be. It's looking less and less likely unfortunately that we will be able to cap warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Again, I am still hopeful that we can. It's looking more likely that by the end of this century, we might warm by 2 to 2.5 degrees Celsius if we all work together to meet the Paris Agreement.

ELEANOR HALL: And what does that look like?

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: Unfortunately when we have a small shift in average temperature, we see quite a large shift in extreme temperature. So even a one degree or a two degree warming actually sees quite a large change, particularly in the frequency in the extreme events.

So the sort of extremes we've talked about in this report, they're already occurring when we've only seen a change in average temperature of one degree. So you can imagine, that would be another two or three times worse, again, when we see increases of two to three degrees Celsius.

ELEANOR HALL: Dr Perkins-Kirkpatrick thanks so much for joining us.

SARAH PERKINS-KIRKPATRICK: My pleasure Eleanor.

ELEANOR HALL: That's Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick from the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales.